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By AppleInsider Staff
Published: 06:00 PM ESTA company specializing in software portability technology has released a portability engine that is supposed to give game developers the power to deploy Windows-based games on Intel Macs almost instantly and without the need for traditional arduous porting.

On its Web site on Thursday, TransGaming introduced the "Cider" portability engine, proclaiming that: "No longer will Mac users be forced to wait months or years for the few top tier titles to get into their hands."

The Toronto-based company said Cider is so effective that publishers will be able to simultaneously deploy the Mac and Windows versions of their titles "with little to no effort", even with games already under development.

"Cider is a sophisticated portability engine that allows Windows games to be run on Intel Macs without any modifications to the original game source code," the company said. "Cider works by directly loading a Windows program into memory on an Intel-Mac and linking it to an optimized version of the Win32 APIs."

According to TransGaming's product information, developers need only to maintain one code base in order to target multiple platforms. Windows games wrapped in the Cider portability engine are said to use the same copy protection, lobbies, game matching and connectivity as the original title.

Additionally, the company said, games migrated to Intel Macs using Cider will also run on Linux under Cedega, allowing developers to forge a path to two game hungry markets at the same time.

I'm a little skeptical. It seems to promise similar performance between OSX and Windows, but any sort of emulation slows things down, especially so with something so processor-intensive as DirectX-to-OpenGL graphics commands.

If the games play okay, I might buy some, but I'd much rather have QUALITY ports made (which is a rarity these days, look at Civilization IV) so that the games can run natively on OSX.

Hopefully, at the very least, this technology will convert a few people over to Macs.